You want pretty or you want a workhorse? Frankly, I don't think a PDF editing program should be a subscription program unless it is web-based or there is some server or Cloud service involved where you are sharing data across a team of users and security is a concern. PDFelement seems to use other brands to marketing their own product and their quality is poor. PDFpen Expert as subscription without OCR, without form creation capabilities, without export features is a bit too high for a pretty UI. Adobe is too expensive and non-intuitive. The alternative is to lock yourself into yet another subscription. Smile's upgrade cost is pretty reasonable for their work. If you find the app useful, I think it is worthwhile to make sure you are running the latest version. I've seen great apps or apps with potential come and go because the developers can no longer support the app- very sad thing. It takes resources to create and develop software. Nothing of quality is free and needs maintenance. They also send you an email when they release a major version to let you know.

For those who 'accidentally' upgrade, there is a notice informing users when it is a paid upgrade.

You are not 'locked-in' to a subscription, and the app is yours forever. I am looking forward to additional developments of PDFpenPro that can bring the app even closer to the offerings of Acrobat, but better than Acrobat.Īs more and more developers are going subscription, I don't mind the optional $30 upgrade to the next major version. Bugs? All apps have bugs and PDFpenPro seems to have less of it over time since they've been around for awhile, but a responsive developer who really works to address it is much appreciated. I contact support regularly if I come across any issues and they are very responsive. For instance, with PDFpenPro, I can create interactive forms, apply digital signatures, batch OCR, and with the latest version, view the same document in two screens! Someone mentioned it is the swiss-army knife of PDF editors for Mac and I agree 100%.

Other apps have better marketing, but PDFpenPro really gets the job done. I am a long-time user of PDFpenPro but have also used Adobe Acrobat and other competing apps.

This is definitely the best alternative to Acrobat Pro.

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